Even for a rapidly changing industry such as technology, the sheer speed with which the mobile internet has taken over our lives is staggering.
The personal computer seemed to become mainstream in no time at all, taking only a couple of decades to reach mass adoption, but the smartphone has made that pace look almost glacial by comparison. According to some estimates, it has reached mass-adoption levels 10 times as quickly – and it is continuing to transform the ways that we live and work.
Some parts of the world have adopted mobile technology faster than others. The Middle East as a whole has fairly high rates of smartphone use, and the UAE in particular is well ahead of some of its fellow Mena countries. An estimated 77 per cent of residents of the UAE have and use smartphones, according to consumer research company Nielsen.
But it is not just wealthy nations that have widespread mobile adoption. Phones have also become a key technology in developing countries such as Kenya, where they are used as mobile wallets and have become a crucial part of the political infrastructure.
For an entire generation of younger users in both the West and the East, the internet is something they access almost exclusively through their phones. Mobile use at very large web entities – such as Facebook, which set a new record recently with more than a billion users in a single day – has ramped up so quickly that it has become the single biggest source of traffic, and is still growing rapidly.
This behavioural shift is changing our world in a myriad of ways. For many younger users, social-networking apps such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) have become the primary way in which they communicate with each other – and increasingly, also the way in which they seek out and relate to advertisers and brands. That is already having a profound effect on businesses as they try to adapt to this new world.
The use of smartphones is also altering the way that internet users get their news and information about the world. A recent study by the US think tank Pew Center found that 68 per cent of smartphone users say they follow along with breaking news events, and about the same proportion often use their phones to share photos, video and text commentary about news events in their community with friends.
E-commerce is becoming a much larger phenomenon in both the West and the East as well, as it moves outwards from early adopter countries such as South Korea and Japan with the advent of mobile. New tools such as Apple Pay will undoubtedly accelerate that trend.
According to one recent research report, the adoption of mobile e-commerce in the UAE is second only to China, with close to 60 per cent of UAE users buying something with their smartphones in the past 12 months, according to PayPal.
On top of all that, the simple interface of phone and app – the paradigm that the Apple founder Steve Jobs hit on with the first iPhone, which ultimately changed the way we think about computers – has become the central way that many of us interact with the world. Not just for chatting or ordering a meal, or checking the status of a flight, but for so many other things – services. Uber, Airbnb and Hotel Tonight are as much a product of the smartphone revolution as they are of pure technology. Our phones have become a remote control for our lives and our world.
What will the future hold? The near future looks as though it will bring even more intelligence into our mobile devices, so that we can just ask Siri or Cortana to do something or find something, and it will be done. Or in the case of the AI that Google has built into its Google Now service, we will find information and helpful services popping up just when we need them, without us even having to ask the question – because the software will know us and our needs so well that it won’t have to wait for a command. The only question for companies such as Google is, will users find that helpful or creepy? Or both?
Mathew Ingram is a senior writer at Fortune magazine.
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